Drawing on the diverse critical debates of the ‘Beckett and Europe’ conference held in Reading, UK, in 2015, this volume brings together a selection of essays to offer an international response to the central question of what ‘Europe’ might mean for our understandings of the work of Samuel Beckett. Ranging from historical and archival work to the close interrogation of language and form, from the influences of various national literary traditions on Beckett’s writing to his influence on the work of other writers and thinkers, this book examines the question of Europe from multiple vantage points so as to reflect the ways in which Beckett’s oeuvre both challenges and enlivens his status as a ‘European writer’. With a full introductory chapter examining the challenging implications of the term ‘Europe’ in the contemporary period, this volume treats Europe as a recognition of the multiple ways that Beckett’s poetry, criticism, prose and drama invite new understandings of the role of history, culture and tradition in one of the most significant bodies of writing of the twentieth century.

Presents an overview of the work of Samuel Beckett. Discussing his famous as well as lesser known texts, the book shows how his characters incorporate silence in their speech to narrate their deaths. Finally it examines Stirring Still, his last text, which evokes his own imminent death.

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another Following the schema of Samuel Beckett's unpublished "Long Observation of the Ray," of which only six manuscript pages exist, poet and critic Michael Coffey interleaves multiple narratives according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This rhythm of themes and genres--involving personal memoir, literary criticism, Beckett studies, contemporary political reportage and accounts of state-sponsored torture in appropriated texts, plus an Arabian Tale and even a baseballplay-by-play--produce a work at once sculptural, theatrical, mathematical and above all lyrical, a new form of narrative answering to a freshened rule set. In executing Beckett's most radical undertaking--one scholar referred to "Long Observation of the Ray" as a "monument to extinction"--Coffey gives readers access to an open field in which ruminations on writing mix with an engagement with Beckett scholarship as well as the unsettling chaos in today's world. Although Beckett, like any writer, had his share of abandoned works, he was in the habit of "unabandoning" on occasion. Coffey's effort here salvages a Beckett project from a half-century ago and brings it to the surface, with the contemporary markings of its hauling.

Beckett's bilingual oeuvre has been approached from many angles, most of which stress its autonomy from understandings of Irishness emerging from the Irish Literary Revival. Emilie Morin shows that such autonomy is only apparent, and that Beckett's avant-garde practices remain bound to the exigencies that govern their very development.

Beckett's Political Imagination uncovers Beckett's lifelong engagement with political thought and political history, showing how this concern informed his work as fiction author, dramatist, critic and translator. This radically new account will appeal to students, researchers and Beckett lovers alike.

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath explores Beckett's literary responses to the political maelstroms of his formative and middle years: the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, the rise of fascism and the atrocities of World War II. Archive yields a Beckett who monitored propaganda in speeches and newspapers, and whose creative work engages with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events. Finally, Beckett's political aesthetic sharpens into focus. Deep within form, Beckett models ominous historical developments as surely as he satirizes artistic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt: imagination and language, theater and narrative, all parallel political techniques. Beckett comically embodies conservative religious and political doctrines; he plays Irish colonial history against contemporary European horrors; he examines aesthetic complicity in effecting atrocity and covering it up. This book offers insightful, original, and vivid readings of Beckett's work up to Three Novels and Endgame.

Bringing to bear their own individual talents and training in philosophy and photography, the authors explore for the first time--and with uncommon insight--Nietzsche's aesthetic world. Krell's masterful translations of the thinker's most evocative writings on his work sites merge seamlessly with Bates's penetrating photographic essays. 240 photos, 65 in color.

This collection of essays reveals the extent to which politics is fundamental to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and writing. Bringing together internationally established and emerging scholars, Beckett and Politics considers Beckett’s work as it relates to three broad areas of political discourse: language politics, biopolitics and geopolitics. Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett’s life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them. This important collection of essays demonstrates that Beckett’s work is not only ripe for political engagement, but also contains significant opportunities for understanding and illuminating the broader relationships between literature, culture and politics.

Discusses the most recent advances in the Beckett field and the new methods used to approach it.

Reflecting the rich critical debate at the ‘Beckett and the State of Ireland’ conferences held in Dublin between 2011 and 2013, this volume brings together a selection of essays which explore and respond to the Irish concerns which echo in the fiction, drama, and poetry of Samuel Beckett. From the portrayals of the haunting landscape of South County Dublin in Beckett’s work to its interrogation of the political and social pieties of the infant nation state in which the author came to maturity, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland uncovers the enduring presence of Ireland in one of the most influential bodies of writing in modern literature. Examining the politics of cultural identity, sexuality in the post-independence era, representations of disability in Beckett’s fiction and drama, Ireland’s culture of incarceration, the role of eugenics in the Irish cultural imagination, and the themes of exile and displacement in Beckett’s writing, amongst other concerns, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland enriches understandings of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of Beckett’s work and introduces new and challenging perspectives to the study of Irish literature and culture.